Survivor's Guilt
by obsidian-lily
Summary: Kelly and Gabi can't deal with the aftermath of Shay's death so they jump into Kelly's car and head west. They are self-destructive and cruel. They are the worst they've ever been and each other's best reminder of their fallen friend. And then things fall apart.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: This basically attacked my brain after getting so far into the show I started Season 3 and then had to stop because damn that sucked. This fic is basically the start of an alternate universe Season 3. Short chapter to start off.**

 _Survivor's guilt: a mental condition that occurs when a person believes they have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not. It has been re-classified as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder._

It started with getting into his car and saying _take me anywhere_. He gave her a lopsided smile and turned the key, turned the car south then west past everything they knew and more she didn't, his face a perfect mask of indifference. Dawson assumed it was his own private passage through grief. To be silent and steady while she alternated between gasping sobs and singing along to the classic rock station Severide found so unerringly through farmland and country towns. She assumed he had a destination. She really did mean anywhere. Chicago was both too large and too small with memories. Their loss a tiny part of the all encompassing rush a city becomes: an oiled machine that doesn't pause to see what's crushed beneath its gears.

For his part, Severide just didn't want to be alone. After the funeral, the final salute, the quiet platitudes and her grieving hollowed out parents: the apartment was too quiet. He could not, would not, pack the mementos her parents didn't take back to the suburbs. The kitchen was never clean. There was no more yogurt to steal and Severide felt more isolated than he had in years. It was an ugly feeling. A feeling that he was existing in the shadow of a great and beautiful thing now long past its expiration. And he was intimately aware of how it died.

He turned to look at Dawson, who was falling apart in his passenger seat, her fingers gesticulating while she sang along with Bob Dylan: a _ny day now, any day now I shall be released._ Tears slipping down her face. He spared a thought for the fact that she knew all the words, figured maybe it was Shay's fault and she'd lost one half of the only equation that had always made sense.

Halfway through the following evening, Dawson smelled the ocean long before she could see it. Severide was driving slowly through the evergreen forests of either Oregon or Washington. She really wasn't paying attention but the stars looked beautiful peeking here and there through the pitch black and darker green fading by her window. It was enough of a reprieve being in the car, the sensation of forward momentum without using her agency. There were enough people suggesting she had to move on eventually. She didn't disagree really, the question was how. Dawson literally had no idea of how to push through to that next step. It seemed pointless and fake and doing something for the sake of progress when the end result was the same for each and every single person regardless. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt this fatalistic about anything.

The moon was rising when Severide pulled to a stop on a bluff overlooking the ocean. You could see how long the beach stretched north to south and far out of sight, merging with the rocks and in some places the trees, only their shadows visible in the pale illumination of a half moon. Dawson watched him get out of the car first. Watched him light up a cigar from his jacket pocket. It made her smile that little bit of consistency in a world gone increasingly off tilt. Severide was always going to be a man with a smoke because _it can't kill me any faster than a fire will_. He wasn't wrong. Stupid, always, but in this at least he wasn't inaccurate so she propped her arm on the windowsill and just kept looking out. Let the ocean breeze float over and through her. She closed her eyes briefly. It seemed like he'd been here before. Like he knew exactly where he was and her anywhere was an actual escape hatch for him. She envied him that ability to pick up and go. It was probably genetic when she thought of his father. How he lived in the woods far and away from anything approaching a town even. If he lived long enough would Kelly do the same?

He ground the butt out under his heel and turned back to her, a small sad smile leaking across his face.

"Come on" he opened her door and Dawson stared up at him, twisting in their shared misery, in his need to leave the echo chamber of all that they remembered and could not take with them into a future without the one person who kept them both so very sane. Dawson took his calloused hand and followed him into the woods, and waited for anywhere to arrive.


	2. Chapter 2

**Hi. I left this story stagnant for too long. If you've seen the other one I'm writing you know why. It's now a mammoth thing. This one will be demonstrably shorter and quieter since it is about grief and loss. Also of course it is slightly AU. Thank you for reading.**

 **Disclaimer: Dick Wolf's sandbox. I'm just playing in it.**

* * *

She woke to the smell of hot coffee and birds chirping. She woke up in a world without one of her closest friends and stuffed her fist in her mouth to swallow the scream that still came unbidden each morning like the last vestige of a nightmare. The night terror was real. The truth hurt, Dawson wrapped her arms around her head, her body pulled in on itself. She imagined herself a tortoise shell, all the soft bits tucked in and away so they wouldn't be hurt but she was. Each morning, her grief astounded her. Shay was the first call. The first person to hear anything about her life and she wasn't even going to look at her phone because Antonio had probably already sent several texts, and voicemail each filled with a vaguely worded threat from their mother.

On second thought. Dawson stuck one hand out from under her pillow to pull her phone from the nightstand. She took the battery out. Ripped the SIM from its crevice and tossed it all to the floor before turning over into an unexpected sunbeam from the window. Fuck. It was tomorrow. She lay there for countless minutes, incapable of getting up. She listened to the birds, driving her more and more mad as only a city girl could be, surrounded by so much nature. The coffee smelled good but she knew Severide would not intrude on her solitude. Blessedly, the playboy firefighter had some intuition for the way she handled grief, and she did too. She was never going to ask him if he was okay. His best friend had died. She had watched their friend die. Neither of them were okay.

But then her stomach growled. And she could hear the shuffle of Kelly's feet, and the clicking shut of a wooden door, the front door she suspected, and Dawson sat up slowly to greet the day. She didn't know the time and didn't want to. Sunlight told her it was afternoon probably and her stomach was gnawing on itself. It served to remind her she was alive. Her body demanded she continue to be so. Grumbling incoherently she stubbed her toe, fumbling out of the bed and to the only door of the bedroom.

She was greeted by unbearable light. By windows wide open, curtains softly moving in the window. It was a glorious day and she fucking hated it. The room she had slept in abutted right onto the simple kitchen. She saw the coffeemaker and the mug Severide had put out and she glanced around to the living room where he'd slept on the pullout mattress from the couch. It barely looked slept in. And she didn't think of Severide as a particularly neat and tidy guy. Especially not now, with the pall of grief hanging over him, a bitter counterweight to the strength of his broad shoulders. Dawson squinted and scratched at her eyes before she poured herself some coffee and struggled in her decision to seek her colleague out.

He'd given her a gift. Given her the reprieve she needed as the world clouded over and crowded in. She didn't want to be Paramedic in Charge Dawson, just accepted to firefighters' academy and all around tough chick. She wanted to be Gabi, Leslie's friend and confidante. She wanted to crawl into the other girl's bed and whisper how Casey had maybe decided to marry her and could she believe it? Everything she had ever wanted was finally finally happening. And then Shay would snort, whack her with a pillow and say: _it took you two idiots long enough_. Except she didn't actually have the ring, it was only an intuition and in the days after Shay's collapse, she could barely look at anyone without wanting to cry so she didn't look at all. Not even Casey. And then the fucking funeral…

"Hey,"

Severide looked tentative as he stepped back inside with an armload of firewood and a fine sheen of sweat across his haggard face. Dawson startled at the sound of his voice. She realized then, that she hadn't spoken a word since they'd arrived the night before. Since he'd guided her, hand at the small of her back through the woods to this house all the while in her head she was singing, _to grandmother's house we go!_

Except she had no fucking clue where they were and Dawson's instinctive curiosity peeked out from behind her misery. Severide had so many secrets damn him.

"What is this place?" she croaked, sipping her coffee to soothe her throat. Not where. She actually couldn't have cared where they were as long as she was alone and could dwell on her thoughts in peace. Severide shrugged as he dumped the wood next to the fireplace. It'd been cold the night before but she hadn't noticed it enough to care. Maybe he'd been shivering and that was why he couldn't sleep. She didn't ask.

"Mum's. She never told Benny and I only found out about it after she died"

"Oh yeah?" she responded noncommittally. She noted how his voice got even softer when he talked about his mom, another woman who'd died way before her time. There was a lilt to his speech that made her think she'd spoken in the same manner and it only came out when he mentioned her.

"Might have been a family vacation house or something. There were pictures. I'll never know. Who cares anyway."

Who indeed but it was clear he'd kept up the place. And if she remembered correctly, his mother had died while he was a teenager which meant this had been his bolthole for more than a decade. She could have asked another personal question but Dawson was tired and it really didn't matter. Severide had allowed her to come along on his escape ride from Chicago and she was more than a little grateful. Impulsively she set the coffee down and strode over to hug him from behind as he organized the firewood. She hugged him tight, quiet for long moments when he didn't protest, the simple familiarity of his sweat and body enough to ground her while all the world went mad.

"Thank you Kelly." Dawson whispered this into his shirt over his spine. Severide stiffened then relaxed in her grasp. His callused hands gripped hers around his waist.

"I did nothing."

Dawson went still. Severide wasn't talking about her. He was bringing up the one thing they did not dare broach. The cataclysm that had thrust them right over the edge into this space where they avoided everyone and everything they loved. She pulled back violently.

"Neither did I so shut up"

"Dawson…"

"I said shut up!"

And with that, Dawson flung herself out of the house, stumbling away into the sunlight where Severide didn't follow.

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 _more on where they are in the next chapter!_


End file.
